Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command Versus Gift Exchange
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Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command Versus G ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
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for interactive in reference to the relationship between two inert objects, in what itself is a dubious analogy.

Further, there seems to be a certain weakness among users of this term in accepting without question the notion that a key characteristic of reciprocity is that it always benefits both agents and the wider social environment. Because it can easily be shown that not all cases of non-market-based exchanges between humans lead to such an admirable outcome, researchers may then be obliged to redefine such exchanges as nonreciprocal.

An example of this kind of redefinition occurs in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, edited by Lydia H. Liu. In her introduction, Liu stated that

we seek a critical alternative to the studies of colonial metropoles, local resistance, cultural hybridity, and so on by proposing two sets of critical interventions in contemporary theory. These consist in historical analyses that focus on (1) how the circumstantial meeting of languages and people produces and contests the reciprocity of meaning-value between those same languages and cultures so that translation becomes a cognitive possibility; and (2) how reciprocity becomes thinkable and contestable as a problem in translingual and transcultural exchanges when predominantly unequal forms of global exchange characterize the material and intellectual conditions of that exchange. We pay close attention to the granting or withholding of reciprocity of meaning-value among languages and societies and treat the distribution of such values as a key mechanism in global circulations and relations of power.49

Liu’s perception and analysis of these unequal power structures provide significant new insights in studies of linguistic transactions between Chinese and English. However, Liu’s use of the term reciprocity is misleading because it assumes that reciprocity is always good while its withholding is bad, and false perceptions that (balanced) reciprocity exists, where in fact it does not, provide a cover for unequal power structures, as in colonial societies.